Seeing (from) Digital Peripheries: Technology and Transparency in Kenya's Silicon Savannah
Seeing (from) Digital Peripheries: Technology and Transparency in Kenya's Silicon Savannah
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从数字周边看：肯尼亚硅谷的技术和透明度
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发表时间：
2016
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通讯作者：
Lisa Poggiali
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作者：
Lisa Poggiali
这篇文章聚焦于数位科技在肯亚奈洛比（Nairobi）这个被称为矽大草原（Silicon Savannah）的地方近来的扩散，如何塑造城市贫民的渴望与焦虑。我以一个非政府组织的计画为出发点，邀请当地居民为自己的社区绘制数位地图，探讨地理空间技术如何体现肯尼亚雄心勃勃的发展计划的共同梦想，以及如何牵涉到有关专业知识、透明度、能见度和真相的辩论。特别地，我讨论了关于技术、透明度和调解的乌托邦意识形态是如何构建关于地图和地图制作者的信念的，以及数字形式的象征和物质质量是如何交替地促进和挑战定居居民的自我实现的。通过强调主体性和权力的社会关系如何影响对透明度的理解，我建议定居点居民将透明度话语作为一种对技术专长提出主张的形式；通过数字地图让他们的邻居可见，制图者也试图让自己作为技术专家可见。然而，在他们努力在社会上崭露头角的过程中，地图制作者作为技术专家的地位受到了质疑。我认为，要看到通过技术想象和社会技术参与（再）产生的不平等，我们必须将新媒体技术分析为社会政治认可的潜在载体——也就是说，作为使社会权力关系可见的技术——以及作为战场，城市穷人对透明度和专业知识的要求被肯定或忽视，被关注或被忽视。
This article focuses on how the recent proliferation of digital technologies in Nairobi, Kenya — a place many refer to as Silicon Savannah — is shaping the aspirations and anxieties of the city’s poor. Taking as its point of departure an NGO project that enlisted settlement residents to digitally map their own neighborhood, I explore how geospatial technologies came to embody the shared dreams that animated Kenya’s ambitious development plans and became implicated in debates about expertise, transparency, visibility, and truth. In particular, I discuss how utopian ideologies about technology, transparency, and mediation structured beliefs about the maps and mapmakers, and how the symbolic and material qualities of the digital form alternately enabled and challenged settlement residents’ self-actualization. By foregrounding the ways in which subjectivity and social relations of power inform understandings of transparency, I suggest that settlement residents invoked transparency discourse as a form of claim-making about technological expertise; through making their neighborhood visible through digital mapping, the mappers also attempted to make themselves visible as technical experts. In their struggle to become socially visible, however, the mapmakers’ status as technical experts was thrown into question. I argue that to see the inequalities (re)produced through technological imaginaries and sociotechnical engagements, we must analyze new media technologies as both potential vectors of sociopolitical recognition — that is, as technologies that make social relations of power visible — and as battlegrounds on which the urban poor’s claims to transparency and expertise are affirmed or ignored, heeded or disregarded.